Many coke oven batteries in the United States and around the world are in excess of fifty years old, which batteries were made to a large extent of silica bricks. As they age the silica brick heating walls begin to degrade, and they need repairs ranging from patching and spraying of material to prevent further cracking and to slow down the degradation that is taking place to replacing an end portion of a heating wall. Eventually the heating walls will need to be replaced. Historically, replacing entire heating walls involves constructing a new heating wall of silica bricks, a process that may involve laying in excess of 4000 silica bricks and may take up to two months or longer to complete. There can be over a hundred different shapes of silica bricks, and there are often problems with suppliers of the silica bricks that result in a relatively high percentage of broken bricks, further slowing down the process. Bricks made from a refractory repair mix are somewhat better, in that a smaller percentage of the bricks arrive broken, but there are still thousands of bricks to be laid in hundreds of different shapes, resulting in a long down time and a high expense. Large size, thermally stable blocks or modules of a non-expanding material have been developed, but these had only been used for endwall repairs, meaning that when heating wall replacements had to be done, they were done with smaller bricks.